In Gaza, the Bombs Have Stopped, but Our Suffering Continues

As long as Israel maintains its siege, Palestinians will remain prisoners in our own land.

It’s Ramadan in Gaza. And Israel decided for the nth time to savagely bomb the Palestinians, and destroy scores of buildings.

This year, it is punctuated by scarcity and fear, rather than feast and celebration. For many families in Gaza, this will be a month of mourning. Twenty-nine Palestinians were killed during last weekend’s fierce Israeli military assault, including two pregnant women and an infant just a few months old.

The night before the holy month began, flashes of light penetrated the dark sky as Israel dropped bombs on us yet again.

It all started on Friday when Israel killed four Palestinian demonstrators during the peaceful Great Return March, a grassroots weekly protest movement that I helped launch last year in response to Israel’s ongoing denial of our basic human rights, including its illegal, 12-year siege.

Israel’s violence against the protesters triggered a response. On Saturday morning, military wings of Palestinian factions retaliated by launching dozens of homemade rockets toward towns bordering the Gaza Strip.

I always advocate for nonviolent civil disobedience, but our community suffers under Israel’s violent policies every day. It doesn’t take much analysis to see that some will resist the violence through whatever means they can.

Israel then launched a series of deadly attacks targeting apartment buildings, local businesses, and media offices in a bustling neighborhood called Al-Remal, in the heart of Gaza City.

Buildings crumbled into ashes in an instant. A shop owner, hysterical after seeing his only source of income gone, screamed out of desperation: “Where are the missiles hidden in this building? Where are the nuclear weapons they targeted? Show me!”

We all know what the devastated shopkeeper knows: Israel bombs civilian residential and commercial buildings to keep us in submission—to deter us from rising up and resisting the everyday violence waged against us through its ongoing occupation and blockade of our land.

Like all parents in Gaza, I am at a loss for how to comfort and calm my children each time an Israeli bomb drops. With every explosion, my children run to me in terror. I try to placate them by saying, “Those explosions are far away from our home. They’re near the sea and they won’t come near us.”

I know I’m hiding the truth from them because no one in Gaza is safe, and Israel has killed many children their same age. But if I can’t stop the violence, the least I can do is alleviate its negative impact on my children.

A cease-fire was announced on Monday, but I don’t know how long it will hold.

Netanyahu declared that “the campaign is not over” and added, “We are preparing to continue.” While a cease-fire may provide temporary relief from Israel’s large-scale bombing campaigns, it won’t end the daily suffering our children endure living under Israel’s ongoing military rule.

The reality is that the violence didn’t start a few days ago.

When we’re not being bombed by Israel, Israel’s snipers are gunning down peaceful protesters, journalists, and medics.

Since the Great Return March started last year, Israeli snipers killed 270 Palestinians.

And when Palestinians aren’t being killed by missiles or bullets, we’re dying a slow and painful death as a result of Israel’s blockade. For 12 years, Israel has limited our access to clean drinking water, food, lifesaving medicine, electricity, and construction supplies to rebuild our homes. Without adequate food, shelter, and water, we cannot survive.

Those of us who are left are tormented psychologically. Israel controls our borders and our ability to move, so we are prisoners on our own land. We are denied the right to travel freely to find work or pursue our education, to visit our families in other towns, or even to seek treatment at a hospital.

Our youth unemployment hovers at a staggering 70% because Israel bombs our businesses and cuts off our trade. Gaza’s young people are denied even a flicker of hope.

Cease-fire or not, there is no way out of the endless violence until Israel, the occupying power, ends its illegal blockade and siege of Gaza. Israel cannot control our lives and our land forever. Palestinians, like all people in the world, want to live free.

Ahmed Abu Artema Ahmed Abu Artema is an independent Gaza-based writer, social-media activist, and one of the organizers of the Great Return March.

The Government of Palestine’s Directorate of Education, from its Samaria branch in Nablus, informed Ahmad Badawi Mustafa Ayoub that his teaching duties had been re-assigned on December 8, 1936.

The 35-year-old had 11 days to report to a new school in Deir el-Ghusoun, a village that, according to a 1931 British census, was home to some 450 households, all of them Muslim.

It was in this boys-only school that the third eldest of my five aunts learned to read and write.

While the other village parents kept their young daughters at home, my Palestinian grandfather, the teacher from Samaria, sat his at the classroom’s helm, where the lords of the British Empire held no rein.

In this post-peace era, palls cast over our long negotiation with Israel, these little histories can seem too quaint.

After all, with so many threats against our identity, so many of our people stripped of agency, we Palestinians must spar with an awful present. But in this fight, our family chronicles make for more than wistful conversation. They give us more reasons to endure.

I was reminded of this while scrolling through an archive of my grandfather’s papers, struggling to draw some perspective from the rush of eulogies for Oslo’s ninth life.

What I discovered — in his Ottoman birth certificate, his British teaching credentials, his various letters from this or that Jordanian directorate — was evidence of a life more resolute than the three sovereigns that defined it.

A letter addressed to Ahmad Badawi Mustafa Ayoub from the Deir Ballut District British Inspector. (Courtesy of Samer Badawi)

Ahmad was born in 1901 to Al-Haj Mustafa Ayoub, a Sufi poet from the village of Majdal Sadeq and was a subject of the vast and waning Ottoman Empire, which had by then ruled Palestine for some 400 years.

When his son was barely out of infancy, Ayoub (Arabic for “Job” the prophet) moved his family to Shweikeh, just outside the northern Palestinian town of Tulkarem. There, Ahmad completed his early schooling before enrolling in Jerusalem’s Rashidiya School.

According to a biography written by another of his grandsons, the day of Ahmad’s departure was a festive one, with neighbors and their children gathering to see the young pupil off. Back then, it seems, it was a sight to behold: a village boy bound for Jerusalem, where only a select few attended its finest institutions.

Rashidiya counts among its alumni the Palestinian nationalist poet Ibrahim Touqan, whose signature work from the 1936 “Arab” Revolt or Palestinian Intifada, (Civil disobedience that lasted 3 years and Britain had to dispatch 100,000 troop to control it) the longest sustained nationalist Palestinian uprising against British Mandatory control, eventually became the lyric to Iraq’s national anthem.

Although Ahmad completed his higher-level teaching certificate there, a British administrator ordered him back to the plains of Tulkarem, where he was to open new schools in the then-distant villages of northern Palestine.

And so he did. In nearly four decades of service to the Palestine he knew, my grandfather helped rear two generations of would-be citizens.

To this day, some of his pupils from that era, all septuagenarians themselves, will recall how ustaz (teacher) Ahmad used to strike fear in the hearts of this or that peer, dissuading others who might foolishly be inclined to mischief.

I knew Sido (grandfather) as terse and forceful, too, but I found these qualities reassuring, like the relentless rhythms of a tightly formed qasidah (poem).

In a devastating elegy to his “suffocated generation,” the Damascene poet Nizar Qabbani counsels the children of the “Arab” nation: “You don’t win a war with a reed and a flute.”

But my grandfather, like so many of his comrades from the time, fought a different kind of war. He outlived Britain’s reign and the Ottomans’ before it, and when he retired, his end-of-service certificate, dated June 19, 1961, came stamped by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s Directorate of Education. In Nablus.

The last time I saw Sido, he was sitting on the edge of a bed in the basement of my aunt’s home in Amman. The day marked nothing in particular — no anniversary, no celebration, no birth or death.

Yet there he was, ever the school teacher, his kuffiyeh draped over a black suit jacket, now loose over an atrophied frame.

“May I enter, Sido?” I asked in my timid Arabic. He acknowledged my presence, without saying a word, and I walked in to sit beside him. There, seven decades between us, we sat shoulder to shoulder and let the silence have its say.

He would die soon after, at the age of 92, just as Bill Clinton’s “peace” ushered in a new era of displacement and loss.

Like all refugees, Ahmad Badawi Mustafa Ayoub left the world unmoorned, his memories rent from the land that made them. But his story, like Palestine’s itself, will matter well beyond the next negotiation.

Imprisoning Palestinians Without Trial Is Not Democratic (A mandated British law of administrative detention applied by Israel since its inception)

June 12, 2018 “Information Clearing House” –Israel is not the only democracy in the Middle East. In fact, it’s not a democracy at all.

In the eyes of many Israelis and their supporters worldwide — even those who might criticize some of its policies — Israel is, at the end of the day, a benign democratic state, seeking peace with its neighbors, and guaranteeing equality to all its citizens.

Those who do criticize Israel assume that, if anything went wrong in this democracy, then it was due to the 1967 war.

Imprisoning Palestinians Without Trial Is Not Democratic

Another feature of the “enlightened occupation” is imprisonment without trial. Every fifth Palestinian in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has undergone such an experience.

(Actually 60% of youths have gone through this humiliating revolving prison door. As most Black people in the USA can testify to this apartheid treatment)

It is interesting to compare this Israeli practice with similar American policies in the past and the present, as critics of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement claim that US practices are far worse.

In fact, the worst American example was the imprisonment without trial of one hundred thousand Japanese citizens during World War II, with thirty thousand later detained under the so-called “war on terror.”

(In Israel, it is a systematic practice. Every night, a dozen Palestinian youths are hoarded out of their bed)

Neither of these numbers comes even close to the number of Palestinians who have experienced such a process: including the very young, the old, as well as the long-term incarcerated.

Arrest without trial is a traumatic experience.

Not knowing the charges against you, having no contact with a lawyer and hardly any contact with your family are only some of the concerns that will affect you as a prisoner.

More brutally, many of these arrests are used as means to pressure people into collaboration.

Spreading rumors or shaming people for their alleged or real sexual orientation are also frequently used as methods for leveraging complicity.

As for torture, the reliable website Middle East Monitor published a harrowing article describing the 200 methods used by the Israelis to torture Palestinians. The list is based on a UN report and a report from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

Among other methods it includes beatings, chaining prisoners to doors or chairs for hours, pouring cold and hot water on them, pulling fingers apart, and twisting testicles.

(Actually, the majority of these torture techniques were borrowed from the British mandated power that applied them during the first Palestinian civil disobedience (Intifada) in 1935 and that lasted 3 years. The Palestinians have been demanding democratic elections in municipalities. Britain had to dispatch 100,000 troops and enlisted the Jews in that horror campaign)

Crushing Palestinian Resistance Is Not Democratic

Destroying Palestinians’ Houses Is Not Democratic

Imprisoning Palestinians Without Trial Is Not Democratic

June 12, 2018 “Information Clearing House” –Israel is not the only democracy in the Middle East. In fact, it’s not a democracy at all.

In the eyes of many Israelis and their supporters worldwide — even those who might criticize some of its policies — Israel is, at the end of the day, a benign democratic state, seeking peace with its neighbors, and guaranteeing equality to all its citizens.

Those who do criticize Israel assume that, if anything went wrong in this democracy, then it was due to the 1967 war.

Crushing Palestinian Resistance Is Not Democratic

Under the “enlightened occupation,” settlers have been allowed to form vigilante gangs to harass people and destroy their property. These gangs have changed their approach over the years.

During the 1980s, they used actual terror — from wounding Palestinian leaders (one of them lost his legs in such an attack), to contemplating blowing up the mosques on Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem.

In this century, they have engaged in the daily harassment of Palestinians: uprooting their trees, destroying their yields, and shooting randomly at their homes and vehicles.

Since 2000, there have been at least 100 such attacks reported per month in some areas such as Hebron, where the five hundred settlers, with the silent collaboration of the Israeli army, harassed the locals living nearby in an even more brutal way.

From the very beginning of the occupation then, the Palestinians were given two options: accept the reality of permanent incarceration in a mega-prison for a very long time, or risk the might of the strongest army in the Middle East.

When the Palestinians did resist — as they did in 1987, 2000, 2006, 2012, 2014, and 2016 (Intifada, civil disobedience)— they were targeted as soldiers and units of a conventional army. Thus, villages and towns were bombed as if they were military bases and the unarmed civilian population was shot at as if it was an army on the battlefield.

Today we know too much about life under occupation, before and after Oslo, to take seriously the claim that nonresistance will ensure less oppression.

The arrests without trial (administrative detention inherited from Britain laws during the mandated period) , as experienced by so many over the years (every night, a dozen Palestinian youths are detained for months) ; the demolition of thousands of houses; the killing and wounding of the innocent; the drainage of water wells — these are all testimony to one of the harshest contemporary regimes of our times.

Amnesty International annually documents in a very comprehensive way the nature of the occupation.

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli forces committed unlawful killings of Palestinian civilians, including children, and detained thousands of Palestinians who protested against or otherwise opposed Israel’s continuing military occupation, holding hundreds in administrative detention. Torture and other ill-treatment remained rife and were committed with impunity.

The authorities continued to promote illegal settlements in the West Bank, and severely restricted Palestinians’ freedom of movement, further tightening restrictions amid an escalation of violence from October, which included attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinians and apparent extrajudicial executions by Israeli forces. Israeli settlers in the West Bank attacked Palestinians and their property with virtual impunity.

The Gaza Strip remained under an Israeli military blockade that imposed collective punishment on its inhabitants.

The authorities continued to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank and inside Israel, particularly in Bedouin villages in the Negev/Naqab region, forcibly evicting their residents. (Two of these cases are currently under way)

Let’s take this in stages.

Firstly, assassinations — what Amnesty’s report calls “unlawful killings”: about 15,000 Palestinians have been killed “unlawfully” by Israel since 1967. Among them were 2,000 two children.

Today, Donald Trump delivered on his “evil promise” to claim Jerusalem as Capital of Israel, regardless of the consistent and historic stance of the UN and all the 195 recognized States. As if the USA is endowed to summarizing the decision of the world community.

Since 1915, US Zionists pressured England to agree on a land for the Jews in Palestine in 1917, as part of entering the war. In 2017, an entire century, US Baptist and Protestant sects pressured Israel to agree on Jerusalem as Capital. (Even Apartheid Israeli settlers hasveenough troubles without this new calamity with no end in sight)

A couple of days ago I stated: Do you believe Trump will actually move US embassy to Jerusalem? What for? Tel Aviv is Not more convenient among all the other world embassies and far more secure?

As of 2013, Israel had been condemned in 45 resolutions by United Nations Human Rights Council since its creation in 2006—the Council had resolved almost more resolutions condemning Israel than on the rest of the world combined.

Historical facts prove that there existed the Province of Judea during the Greek and Roman empires. An Israeli Kingdom never existed but in imaginary stories to match the history of the Land in the Levant. All those accumulated stories were meant to give a semblance of history to the Jewish Bedouins down south in the Naqab

If this Symbol of Jerusalem can appease the soul of all the religious sects swarming in this calamity city, let Trump declare Jerusalem a “neutral zone” to all religious sects, including the Jews, and the religious sites run by the UN as museums.

So the US killed, injured, famished and displaced millions of Syrians, Iraqis and Yemenis for 2 decades in order to make the swallowing of Jerusalem as Capital of Israel as a far lesser Evil? Can Jerusalem from now on be considered the Symbolic Center of All evils?

Threatening with an empty pistol? An Israeli commentator on the reactions of the Palestinians and “Arab” people on the eventual proclamation of Trump on Jerusalem as Capital of Israel. As if the readiness of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the reconquest of Syria and Iraq in this world war to divide their territories were done with empty pistol.

Religious institutions mastered the fact that people need stories (myths) to be attached to abstract concepts for viability and credibility.

When in 1967 Israel entered and occupied East Jerusalem, Golda Meir felt relief when the Palestinians did Not demonstrate much revolt. Actually, East Jerusalem was under the mandate of the treacherous Jordanian Kingdom, and the occupiers carried out another wave of transfer of Palestinians around Jerusalem. Thousands of children and females were forced to vacate their villages and hundreds of young males killed while on the road to unknown destinations.

But dignity of people over-ride all kinds of subjugation and occupation. This next civil disobedience (intifada) of the Palestinians will Not be crushed easily and will linger longer than the world war on Syria.

Even in 1933, the Palestinian intifada lasted 4 years and England had to dispatch 100,000 soldiers to quell this civil disobedience and exercised the cruelest of torture and violence on the civilian people.

The Symbol of Jerusalem will unite all the Palestinian political factions and the traitors for appeasement and swapping of security intelligence with USA and Israel will be eliminated

Note: I take notes of books I read and comment on events and edit sentences that fit my style. The page is long and growing like crazy, and the sections I post contains months-old events that are worth refreshing your memory. I hope you can also read French

Will the USA execute its plan to exact its revenge on its defeat in Lebanon.: the liberation of the eastern mountain chains from the terrorist ISIS and Al Nusra?

This Greek, Patriarche of Greek orthodox in Jerusalem has sold the Zionists many pieces of Palestinian heritage without consulting the Palestinians. This sect own a third of ancient Jerusalem. Palestinians from all religious sect are taking him to court. Mind you that Greek PM is also a staunch Zionist sympathizer

I lived in Houston in 1979. Houston is under water. Calamity does Not follow me: It is climate change accelerating its reality.

The war on Syria is meant, planned and designed to be indefinite: No one has any clear idea or sustained determination to end it

Civil Disobedience is the hardest of protests and the most dangerous: citizens got to stop paying taxes, direct and indirect taxes. Which means the protesters have to change their life-style. One example, refrain from driving in order not to pay gasoline taxes to the mafia and militia leaders.

Share with me a list of indirect taxes that this defunct State of Lebanon is imposing upon us.

You learn by asking the proper questions and you learn by teaching. But asking the proper questions require a comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter: analyzing the kinds of questions you have been asking will show you the gap in knowledge.

As part of civil disobedience, students in private schools will Not miss much in knowledge if parents skip a year from paying exorbitant tuition at yearly increase

A suggestion to Lebanese politicians: If asked about your position on freeing our borders from terrorist factions by Hezbollah, reply: Ask the people.

All deals should be handshake deals, after a detailed contract (never signed) and procedural clauses discussed and agreed upon

The real leader of Moustakbal is Fouad Senioura: he is the top agent of USA/Israel and Egypt in Lebanon. He is the shadow PM since he daily receive a copy of the files on the desk of the PM. He compound the files to dispatch them to the corresponding handlers.

Typical one-way talk of Saad with Trump. Donald didn’t care to listen to complexities relative to Hezbollah. Did Hariri find a second to mention Al Aqsa?

Probably a Lebanese contributed to writing Trump’s speech after meeting Hariri: Lengthy and devoid of any meaning. Donald was restless in his body talk, wanting this absurd speech to end.

The higher the company or association cultural density (interactions in decisions), the more important it will get it right.

Facts are facts, but images resonate louder. For example, to unload a ton bricks it would take you more than 2 months, working 24 hours a day, a brick a minute

Evolution has given us an interface that hides reality and guides adaptive behavior. Space and time, as you perceive them right now, are your desktop. Physical objects are simply icons in that desktop